WhACKY! - What anyone could know about you from Twitter

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging website which allows users to post 140-character limit messages called tweets. We demonstrate a cheap and elegant solution - WhACKY! - to harness the multi-source information from tweets to link Twitter profiles across other external services. In particular, we exploit activity feed sharing patterns to map Twitter profiles to their corresponding external service accounts using publicly available APIs. We illustrate a proof-of-concept by mapping 69,496 Twitter profiles to at least one of the five popular external services : Flickr (photo-sharing service), Foursquare (location-based service), YouTube (video-sharing service), Facebook (a popular social network) and LastFM (music-sharing service). We evaluate our solution against a commercial social identity mapping service - FlipTop - and demonstrate the efficiency of our approach. WhACKY! guarantees that the mapped profiles are 100% true-positive and helps quantify the unintended leakage of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) attributes. During the process, WhACKY! is also able to detect duplicate Twitter profiles connected to multiple external services.We also develop a web application based on WhACKY!1 for perusal by Twitterers which can help them better understand unintended leakage of their PII.

[1]  Martin Szomszor,et al.  Correlating user profiles from multiple folksonomies , 2008, Hypertext.

[2]  Vassilis Kostakos,et al.  Proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems , 2008 .

[3]  Stephen Farrell,et al.  Harvesting with SONAR: the value of aggregating social network information , 2008, CHI.

[4]  Balachander Krishnamurthy,et al.  On the leakage of personally identifiable information via online social networks , 2009, CCRV.

[5]  Eugene Ciurana,et al.  Google App Engine , 2009 .

[6]  Kyle Lacy.  Twitter Marketing For Dummies , 2009 .

[7]  Leyla Bilge,et al.  All your contacts are belong to us: automated identity theft attacks on social networks , 2009, WWW '09.

[8]  Vincent Y. Shen,et al.  User identification across multiple social networks , 2009, 2009 First International Conference on Networked Digital Technologies.

[9]  Lise Getoor,et al.  To join or not to join: the illusion of privacy in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles , 2009, WWW '09.

[10]  Vitaly Shmatikov,et al.  De-anonymizing Social Networks , 2009, 2009 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[11]  Reza Zafarani,et al.  Connecting Corresponding Identities across Communities , 2009, ICWSM.

[12]  George Varghese,et al.  I seek you: searching and matching individuals in social networks , 2009, WIDM.

[13]  Calton Pu,et al.  Large Online Social Footprints--An Emerging Threat , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.

[14]  Christopher Krügel,et al.  Abusing Social Networks for Automated User Profiling , 2010, RAID.

[15]  Albert Esterline,et al.  Personally Identifiable Information: Identifying unprotected PII using file-indexing search tools and quantitative analysis , 2010, Proceedings of the IEEE SoutheastCon 2010 (SoutheastCon).

[16]  Yuguang Fang,et al.  Privacy and security for online social networks: challenges and opportunities , 2010, IEEE Network.

[17]  T. Grance,et al.  SP 800-122. Guide to Protecting the Confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) , 2010 .

[18]  Ilaria Torre,et al.  User data distributed on the social web: how to identify users on different social systems and collecting data about them , 2010, HetRec '10.

[19]  Vitaly Shmatikov,et al.  Myths and fallacies of "Personally Identifiable Information" , 2010, Commun. ACM.

[20]  Patrick Gage Kelley,et al.  IWantPrivacy : Widespread Violation of Privacy Settings in the Twitter Social Network , 2010 .

[21]  Xin Shuai,et al.  Loose tweets: an analysis of privacy leaks on twitter , 2011, WPES.

[22]  Calton Pu,et al.  Modeling Unintended Personal-Information Leakage from Multiple Online Social Networks , 2011, IEEE Internet Computing.

[23]  Peter Fankhauser,et al.  Identifying Users Across Social Tagging Systems , 2011, ICWSM.

[24]  Claude Castelluccia,et al.  How Unique and Traceable Are Usernames? , 2011, PETS.

[25]  Hannes Hartenstein,et al.  What Your Friends Tell Others About You: Low Cost Linkability of Social Network Profiles , 2011, SNAKDD 2011.

[26]  Anne Helmond,et al.  Hit, link, like and share. Organising the social and the fabric of the web. , 2011 .